How to Make Sense of Your Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Most enterprises find themselves in a hybrid cloud architecture whether they planned for it or not. Why? As businesses have jumped to create and deliver applications, they’ve adopted cloud strategies that can scale and offer the speed needed for these applications.

Enterprises use a mix of on-prem, public cloud, and private cloud options to keep pace with the demands of customer experience. This is a hybrid cloud architecture and 69 percent of enterprises are expected to be using one by next year.

Hybrid cloud architectures bring more complexity, as types of clouds, multi-clouds, and various options from major public cloud providers mean IT departments face more choices and comparisons.

Here are some of the basic cloud options:

• Internal cloud — the enterprise owns its own assets in its own data center
• Public cloud – many organizations share the cloud
• Private cloud – a public cloud provided for one enterprise

Hybrid cloud is defined in many different ways but generally involves a mix of the above.

Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud

IT decision-makers have to balance and select the right mix of clouds based on their company’s goals, risk tolerance, application development needs, and budget.

Private clouds offer less flexibility but more control over data. Public clouds are highly flexible, but also offer less direct control over data. Internal clouds give companies more control, but with less geophysical servers and can come with higher costs.

From an application development standpoint, public clouds offer greater scalability and speed for continuous development and delivery—developers can build, test, deploy, get feedback, and update applications—all without disrupting end user experience. This delivers the real-time, always-on customer experience that today’s consumers expect from every brand.

Hybrid clouds enable enterprises to take advantage of the pros of each cloud they use, while minimizing risk and meeting compliance needs. Hybrid clouds ensure high availability, improve fault tolerance, and create disaster recovery.

The Enterprise Data Layer Solves the Hybrid Cloud Issues

As enterprises work with their hybrid cloud architecture, they find they need an enterprise data layer that can sit on top all of their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architecture. This data layer ensures that enterprises can address three major concerns that hybrid clouds naturally create:

Cloud vendor lock-In

Every cloud provider uses different concepts and abstractions. It’s pretty easy to move virtual machine or OS container images from on-prem to cloud (or one provider to another), but it’s far more difficult to appropriately configure application environments in a secure, reliable, cost-effective fashion for each cloud. Enterprises are realizing the risks of vendor lock-in and concerned about data portability.

Data silos

Inconsistent data models in each cloud can inhibit data mobility between clouds. As enterprises start optimizing for data residing in each cloud, it creates data silos, which make data governance more complex and creates data sovereignty and compliance challenges.

Rapid application development

No hybrid cloud environment is worth it if it cannot enable you to quickly deliver and scale applications. The challenges of data silos and data inconsistency can threaten an enterprises’ ability to do this and leverage the full advantage of their cloud investments.

How DataStax Enterprise Active Everywhere Optimizes Hybrid Cloud Deployments

DataStax Enterprise Active Everywhere architecture enables enterprises to build a consistent enterprise data layer across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud. It eliminates data silos and accelerates hybrid/multi-cloud deployments.

An enterprise data layer provides all the operational, or transactional, data in a single logical layer, that is highly distributed, always on, and highly secure, delivering the data and ingesting massive amounts of writes, all in real time. With this architecture, enterprises can deploy part of the data layer on premise, part of it in one public cloud, and part of it in another public cloud. Enterprises can also move the data in and out of any cloud at any time, with no downtime or re-writing of their applications.

An Active Everywhere architecture matters because rather than relying on a typical master/replica architecture common with relational databases and most NoSQL databases, Active Everywhere has no master point that controls write traffic.

A hybrid cloud architecture is complex and requires careful strategic planning—often at a very rapid pace that must keep up with the need for deploying applications. DataStax is an expert in hybrid cloud database architecture and is here to help you make sense of how to benefit from an enterprise data layer.